incompetence

plural incompetences

1. uncountableusuallyAn inability to perform; a lack of competence; ineptitude.

   The factory where she worked was a poisonous mass of incompetence, favoritism, and sabotage.

   1974, Ursula Leguin, The Dispossessed

   2 more examples

   ... at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals--morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck

   1851 November 14, Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley, →OCLC

   Winston did not know why Withers had been disgraced. Perhaps it was for corruption or incompetence. Perhaps Big Brother was merely getting rid of a too-popular subordinate.

   1949 June 8, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, London: Secker & Warburg, →OCLC; republished [Australia]: Project Gutenberg of Australia, August 2001